Climate-friendly food

Summary

Climate change is without doubt one of the greatest challenges mankind has ever faced. This is not least due to the enormous consequences that climate change will have for the world’s ecosystems and for our living conditions. At the same time, climate change is a colossal political problem, in which the world’s democracies run the risk not being able to carry out the decisions that have to be made. The political and democratic problem builds on the very limited understanding that there is a connection between emissions of greenhouse gases, climate change and their impact on the living conditions of individual people. In reality, there is both a spatial and a temporal separation between emissions and effects. The world’s industrialised countries, which emit by far the largest amount of greenhouse gases, are in the first instance the least vulnerable to the effects of climate change. In addition, serious effects will first occur much later (decades to centuries) than the emissions. Therefore it can be very difficult to generate popular backing for serious initiatives against emissions of greenhouse gases. Agriculture and food production play an important role in this connection due to the importance of climate change for agriculture’s production basis and because it is one of the sectors emitting most greenhouse gases. For agriculture, the climate challenge is therefore double – it must both adapt to the changes and at the same time reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases.